Love notes

An Equal Music - Vikram Seth (Vintage International, 1999)

So I really have been reading, I swear. Watch this mass of posts I'm about to drop on you. :)

I really love how Seth writes. He's beautiful and eloquent without being particularly difficult, so there's an easy flow and rhythm to reading him. (This was of course particularly the case with Golden Gate.) But I just never fell in love with this book. I wanted to. I kept waiting to feel utterly engaged, but I guess that the characters held themselves at such remove that I always felt kept at arm's length. I have to assume this was purposeful, but since I tend to want to fall headlong into my novels, it was difficult for me.

But if you are interested in the world of European musicians, it's still a lovely read. Michael is a violinist in a London quartet, haunted by the love he lost in Vienna when he fled with little warning. From what I can tell, he had serious issues with panic, and working with his mentor there was eating away at him. [With this, I can sympathize.] The lost Julia reappears, through a bus window, and slowly makes her way back into his world. She is married and has a small child, but their lives entangle once more, and she travels with the quartet to Vienna.

There's more to it -- a secret, another panic attack, an elderly and lost father and aunt back in the rural working-class North, and a violin which doesn't belong to him, but which is truly the greatest love and partnership Michael has ever known -- but it's not particularly a plot-driven novel. It's more about the vignettes of thought, observation, remembrance. If I knew more about music, I would venture to guess that the structure is somewhat reminiscent of some sort of work of composition, études maybe?

Lad lit!

The Calligrapher - Edward Docx (Houghton Mifflin, 2003)

Vacation reading. In fact, I was on a cruise line resort "in" Haiti when I finished this book. And I made everyone else in my cabana (#firstworldproblems) listen to my wtf explanations when I got to the last page and realized that there was no next chapter.

But if I complain too much, I'll probably give away too much, and I'm sure plenty of people will be perfectly satisfied with this ending anyway.

Jasper is this suave superior London calligrapher, who is working on a series of John Donne love poems. Along the way, his philandering ruins one relationship and sets him on a collision course with his sexy new neighbor. He pulls out all the stops to win her over, but will his past misdeeds catch up with him?

I saw the plot twists coming, and didn't find Jasper particularly sympathetic, but yet was perfectly happy to come along for the ride. Jasper was a prick, but an interesting storyteller, and you reached the point where you'd be fine seeing him either weasel his way to victory or receive a humiliating comeuppance. Either way. I saw the plot twists coming from pretty far away (and perhaps that was the intention) but they were still nicely delivered. In the end I was willing to accept that Docx's ending was probably better than the one I was waiting for. Or the other one I was waiting for. Or the third.

A Glittering Void

The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst (Bloomsbury, 2004)

...and the last in my trilogy of Sunday posts. This was the book I started reading first, and the one that I finally just finished this morning. And I can't decide what that says about the book itself.

First, let me set the scene. Nick is a young gay man in early 1980s London, an Oxbridge grad who is living with an upper-class friend's family. The father has just been elected to Parliament, right as Thatcher was re-elected (I think). "The Lady" is an enormous figure in the book, although she herself appears only briefly, and it was a (lucky?) coincidence that she died while I was reading the book, and I got to see why she loomed so controversially larger than life in the minds of Britons. Meanwhile, the inexperienced Nick gets his first taste of sex and reciprocated love, which spirals out of control in the way only the '80s really could.

The prose was beautiful. So lovely and readable. Once I picked up the book, I tended to read in great big chunks. But I wasn't compelled to sneak in reading time, which is how it lingered while I snuck in two (lesser) books.

I think I'm missing the point

Major Barbara - (George) Bernard Shaw (Penguin Books, 1913, 1951)

I am pretty sure I'm exactly the kind of fan GBS would not have wanted. I swoon over the witty dialogue and fast pace and the sort of ineffable charm that his plays possess. I also manage to read them as sort of skewed romantic comedies, or I least I did with Arms and the Man, which I am now once more desperate to see staged.

But if you read the plays and slog through the author's prefaces, you'll see what is so easily glossed over by the audience, which is that GBS is trying to make rather biting commentary about society and capitalism and the class structure and morality and and and. It's all rather exhausting.

When I'm feeling particularly bright, I like to think that it's the way that he packages the two things together - the comedy of manners and the sharp critique of someone who would enjoy such a thing (namely me) - that is what I admire in his work. But I fear that might be painting too rosy a picture.

Whatever. George Bernard Shaw knew exactly the kind of audience he was reaching, and I'm going to try not to feel guilty about liking the "wrong" things about his plays.

Oh, which reminds me that maybe I should tell you about Major Barbara. Said Major is a wealthy young lady who has joined the Salvation Army. Her estranged father is an arms manufacturer, her mother an aristocrat. Her mother calls her father back to town because the family needs more money - one daughter is marrying a doofus who won't come into money for a few more years, Barbara is doing her Salvation Army thing and marrying a (rather upwardly mobile, it turns out) Greek professor, and the son is fairly worthless as well. And what ensues is much banter, including a scene at the Army site, which involves dialogue with an accent so thick I had to read aloud to figure out what was being said. And in the end, well I suppose everyone is made to look the hypocrite. And it was delightful.

How to become a bestselling novelist

The Glamorous (Double) Life of Isabel Bookbinder - Holly McQueen (Washington Square Press, 2008)


I really shouldn't complain, b/c this book made me laugh a lot. (It's always fun when the baristas look over at you wondering what's so funny.) And it has a cute twist. And the requisite Daniel/Mark Darcy triangle. However, I don't feel like we get to know our romantic male lead nearly well enough, and we probably should.

More importantly, who are you, Isabel??? Her antics and total inability to understand almost anything led me from chuckling to wanting to bang my head on the table. I kept waiting for some sort of personal growth, or something... but if it existed, I missed it. I probably felt this especially keenly having just left Ellie from The Last Letter from your Lover.

Lots of intriguing characters though, and I think McQueen has a lot of space to play around with the eccentric mother secretly pursuing a bizarre dream, the disapproving father, the friend who has everything together except for a totally unreasonable crush (I wanted more of this storyline!). This is her first novel, and I'll be curious to see how her next ones develop.

Aw, it's blue because... well, you'll see

Something Blue - Emily Giffin (St. Martin's Griffin, 2005)

Have I mentioned anything about liking John Krasinski? Maybe once or twice?

Anyway, I'm so glad he's (I presume) going to be playing Ethan when they film this follow-up to Something Borrowed.

Um, there's really no way to talk about this book without spoiling the end of the earlier novel, so we'll have to deal with that. Darcy has spent 30 years as the golden girl, who always gets what she wants. And who is always wanted. And suddenly she finds herself alone, dumped by friends and loved ones, and pregnant. So she does what any woman would do - flee to London.

I preferred this book to the first, which I didn't expect. I never really got over my discomfort with Dex. I kept wondering... if I were Rachel's friend, wouldn't I tell her she's too good for him? That she deserves someone more willing to take a stand? In this novel, the ick factor was different. Darcy is a bitch, but she's also our first-person narrator, and it's nice to remember from time to time that shallow and selfish people aren't only shallow and selfish, that they often believe they are trying to be good, and that often enough, they are capable of growing up.

So we grow to like Darcy. And we are awfully fond of Ethan, the childhood friend who finds himself a sucker for Darcy's damsel in distress. And so it works. And works enough that I devoted an entire Saturday to devouring the book essentially in a single sitting.

Finishing School 2.0

The Finishing Touches - Hester Browne (large print edition, Wheeler, 2009)

Remember how I said "No more chick lit for a while"??? Somehow this didn't stop me from leaving the library last Friday with yet another one. This one is British though, which I kind of think should be a separate category.

And I really enjoyed it. The storyline is sort of absurd: this baby is abandoned on the doorstep of a London finishing school (the morning of/before Princess Di's wedding) and raised by the lord and lady who run the place and two old maid employees. Flash forward to the present. Betsy's adoptive mother has died and Betsy returns from Scotland for the memorial service where she discovers that the school is in shambles. (Duh, b/c who goes to finishing school in 2008?) Betsy got a math degree instead of going to the school herself - she is bitter about this actually - and is recruited to save the place and her mother's legacy. High jinks ensue. [That is my standard ending for pretty much ever plot summary, if you haven't noticed.]

But here are the things that make it work: British heroines are almost always more self-aware and hilarious than their American counterparts, and the supporting cast is just better. The four students - crazy rich young women - are adorably written, and I got a kick out of how they and Betsy interacted. It was over-the-top, but it also seemed real. And the love story was well-crafted. Browne sets it up so you're like, oh, it's this cliche. And then immediately something else happens, and you're like, oh nevermind, it's this cliche. And then sends you tripping back and forth between them for quite a while. Well played.

(On a side note, I ended up with the large print edition, which made the book almost 600 pages long and more importantly often made me feel like I was reading a kids' book. I understand why a lot of people who don't need the large print refuse to read it. It probably took well over 100 pages to get used to it.)

And now, seriously, I'm going to try to take a break from the chick lit. I swear.

The wisdom of young fools

The Two Lives of Miss Charlotte Merryweather - Alexandra Potter (Plume 2010)

I've mentioned enough times my complete adoration for parallel universes and the ability to be able to see the paths not taken, to measure out opportunity costs. I, for one, will probably always wonder about the Erin out there who went not to DC, but to Toronto, and where she is now. But Sliding Doors and The Post-Birthday World and now Potter's novel serve as a good reminder that it's the little moments, not the big decisions, that have the biggest impact.

And this isn't actually particularly Sliding Doors. This book came across my desk at the library, and I was charmed by the cover, so I kept an eye on it, and as soon as I finished my last final, snagged it the second it came back in the door of the library. It seemed light, refreshing, set in London, and fun - everything I needed at the end of the semester.

So Charlotte. Is on the verge of 32 and a total stressball. A successful stressball, but still. And then a traffic detour shoots her through a wormhole (I guess?) and back to 1997, where her 21-year-old expat self is a happy-go-lucky bundle of Id. Young Charlotte doesn't recognize the now-blond, thinner (stressball) Charlotte as herself, and so Older Charlotte decides to impart some life lessons. (Lessons that she has apparently learned over 10 years, but I guess she wants to speed up the process?) And quelle surprise, it turns out Charlotte has a lot to learn from her younger self, especially about love.

It's a consummate beach read, and really quite charming. (And Potter - who incidentally has an adorable website - has also written the obligatory Mr. Darcy novel, so I'm sure I'll have to check it out too.)

Tiny Tim, grown up

Mr. Timothy - Louis Bayard
New York: Perennial, 2004 (trade paperback)

I stopped reading books for about a month. I got distracted by things, such as:

• the inauguration
• work
• magazines (1, 2, 3)
• school
• a trip to the ER (albeit a largely unnecessary one)
• old tv shows about teen detectives

But this past week I was ready for an actual book again, so picked up one that has been on my bookshelf since my "Auntie Mame" (and yes, someday I will actually have to read the book and/or watch the movie) gave it to me for Christmas probably 5 years ago.

The book? Louis Bayard's Mr. Timothy, a thriller about the grown Tiny Tim and his efforts to save a young girl from a sexual predator. Interspersed among the action, and Timothy's quite touching relationship with two strong-willed and yet vulnerable urchins, is enough backstory to catch us up on what happened in the years after The Christmas Carol and Ebenezer Scrooge's change of heart. Tim is still trying to make sense of his relationships with his father and his benefactor, each of whom projected their own sense of whom Tim needed to be. Now, he's still trying to figure out his own identity. And finds it, unexpectedly, through his interaction with the two children.

The story moved quickly, and did not feel close to 400 pages. Yet it's not an easy read either, per se. It's an evocative, and disturbing, at times confusing, yet ultimately satisfying novel. And for a girl who hasn't particularly liked revisiting Dickensian London for probably 10 or more years, it was an unexpected pleasure.

The Journal of Dora Damage

I can't decide whether or not author Belinda Starling's tale outshines her heroine's. A young mother, Starling had just finished The Journal of Dora Damage when a routine operation went awry and she died from septic shock. Her brother wrote an afterword to eulogize her, an author who did not live to see her book bound.

But for over 400 pages, Dora succeeds in taking the reader's attention away from Starling's tragic death. Dora is a London housewife in 1860 whose family faces ruin, and takes salvation upon her shoulders by manning her husband's bookbindery. Except it's a bitch to keep the creditors at bay, deal with a sick husband and daughter, and have time to ply a trade that women weren't supposed to do. Until she gets in with a crowd of aristocratic men with porno- and ethnographic tastes, whose secrets she keeps in exchange for them keeping her own.

And then things get more heated, in all sorts of senses of the term. But throughout it, Dora exudes a pretty impressive sense of calm. This is what (lower)middle-class women did; they shouldered what came at them, and kept households and communities afloat.

It's a bit embarrassing to be an avid reader who has never really thought about how books are made. Once you move past Book of Kells inscriptions and the tedium of typesetting, I'm entirely out of my realm. How do the pages all stick together? Dunno. Which provided another bright point in Dora Damage - the descriptions of the workshop, and of the binding process, were illuminating. And the individual attention taken, to match leather and border design with text.... Now, if only I knew how they made those trade paperbacks I love so much.

You can't always get what you want...

... but you just might find, you get what you need.

Shriver's The Post-Birthday World continued to delight me. It was so honest. That there are no perfect choices. That when two paths diverge in a wood, both have their merits. And we get to inspect the ramifications, on both sides, of a fateful kiss (or not).

Since I've already shared some thoughts on the book, I thought I'd just do special quotes instead.

She theorized that for everyone there was that one high you couldn't refuse, for which you'd sell your soul - and anyone else's. [...] Thus the only protection from yourself in this instance was never to try it [...] Yet here was Ramsey Acton, the one substance on earth that Irina Galina McGovern could not resist. She'd had fair warning in July, sniffed a few heady grains from a split vial, just enough to know that this was the drug that she had been avoiding her whole life.

Haven't we all felt like that? And a comment on 9/11 that is so easy to forget, and yet so true:

Much as it's worth recalling that for whole years of World War II no one knew whether Hitler might win, it would soon behoove Americans to remember that for a few hours on that eleventh of September no one knew if more plans might be out there [...] Now that the spinning globe on which we hurtle was clearly not standing still, anything could happen, and anything did

But here's a line, from a description one of Irina's children's books, that sums it all up:

Because when he looks back on his life, Martin realizes that he has spent his life doing something that he loves, and that, to him at least, is beautiful.

We don't only have one destiny. And lucky us, we get to see two of Irina's.

Sliding Doors

This 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow film is one of my favorites. It's a reminder of how little it takes sometimes to send life hurtling down another path entirely. And reinforces my childhood belief in parallel universes. (Do I believe in them still? I couldn't tell you.)

Anyway, the conceit of Lionel Shriver's The Post-Birthday World is roughly the same. Although this time the choice the protagonist makes is hers alone, not forced upon her by a girl with a Barbie doll. And the setting - late 90s London - is also the same. Oddly enough. Maybe London is an epicenter of parallel lives? Irina has dinner with her partner Lawrence's friend, continuing a long-standing tradition while Lawrence is out of town. She's not particularly excited about her charge, but as the evening wears on, she is drawn inexorably toward Ramsey and is about, unless she can stop herself, to kiss him.

Then, in alternately chapters, the way life unfolds depending on her decisions. So many parallels. So similar, and yet utterly different. I'm not quite half-way through yet, but I am so drawn to the story. So fascinated. And surprisingly invested in the characters.

An early passage, from before the big choice:

At its most torrid, your love life was merely titillating to others, and the done-deal nature of established couples like Irina and Lawrence was doubtless a big bore. Romantic devastation occasioned, at most, an onlooker's tinny sympathy or schadenfreude. Romantic delirium was even worse. Newly inlove, you expected to draw envy or admiration, but were far more likely to attract a finger-drumming impatience for you to get over it. [...] Some friends regarded Irina-and-Lawrence as a factual matter, like the existence of France. Others relied on the couple as a touchstone, proof that it was possible to be happy; the role was a burden.

This rang so true to me. And yet, it's so strange that while we often feel this way about the people we know, we are able to invest so much of ourselves into these same situations when they occur for characters in a book, a film, or even a tv show. Any thoughts on why?

Angelica, or The Perils of Parenthood

It seems appropriate that on Father's Day (happy day to all the dads, including mine who is on the 5 right now) I get to blog about a father-daughter relationship. And a father-mother one. And a mother-daughter one. Oh, and the mother-daughter-ghost one. And the spiritualist. And the maid, and ...



Anyway, Arthur Phillips has shown he likes to write mysteries. Not of the whodunit kind, but of a deeper, where is the truth when everyone can see only their own experience of the truth? variety. Even in his first novel, Prague, he employs multiple viewpoints to get at a wider sense of expat Budapest. (Siel has been reading about subjective reality too.)

In Angelica, Phillips goes all out - and shows how entirely people create their own truths. And with each retelling (there are 3 1/2) of the haunting of the little girl and her mother - possibly by the spectral manifestation of the father's sexual appetite - sympathies shift and misunderstandings are laid bare. And still any objective truth remains elusive. As a grown Angelica finally laments:

If each of the players performed his own unconnected drama, then it is only in the intersection of those dramas that my life can be seen, through the latticed spaces where light can pass between three stories laid over each over. And yet when I lay these stories atop each other, no light does pass and no space remains. All my knowledge consumes itself.

Why fate doesn't always cooperate

I'm sad right now. I just finished reading Sally Beauman's The Sisters Mortland, on loan from Carolline, and it's one of those books that makes me want to mope around until I something distracts from the fact that life doesn't always finish happily ever after.

That said, it's gorgeous, and haunting - even if sometimes a little too pat. The eponymous sisters are the center of the piece, even though a good half of it involves them as they are seen by others, particularly in the painting of the same name as the novel. Three stunningly beautiful sisters, who have fatal flaws and family secrets; and the young men whose lives intertwine around theirs, during the summer of 1967. And whose lives continue to intersect in increasingly complicated ways even 23 years later.

Beauman employs a writerly trick that I always fall for, and thus tend to resent. We see characters perhaps better than they see themselves, and then root for them to figure out what we've already deduced. Because we, as readers, want the happy ending. Or at least the satisfying one. Life is difficult enough - can't we at least believe in satisfaction, at the end of the day?

Snarky

This week's surprisingly quick read was Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh. First published in 1930, it details the mostly vapid lives of London's "Bright Young Things." Waugh has a sharp wit and is often very funny, but I was somewhat unsatisfied. He just seems so mean-spirited; I started feeling uncomfortable that no one had any particularly redeeming characteristics. I guess I prefer a slightly more tender bite.

But I'm willing to give Waugh another try - he was young when he wrote Vile Bodies, so I'll have to see if he softened a bit with age. Besides, how can you not love someone who writes this about the Prime Minister:

" '...You treat me like a child,' he said. It was all like one of those Cabinet meetings, when they all talked about something he didn't understand and paid no attention to him."

Who knew Bush was prime minister in the 20s?